Teleportation, cyborgs and the posthuman ideology

This paper is concerned with a set of phenomena that lies at the intersection of popular culture, genetics, cybertechnology, nanotechnology, biotechnology and other advanced technologies, bio-ethics, science speculation, science fiction, mythology, the New Age Movement, cults, commerce and globalization. At the centre is a radical technophilia that finds representative expression in posthumanism, an Internet-based social movement driven by an extreme scientific utopianism. This set of phenomena constitutes an articulated cultural response to a number of underlying economic, technological and social dynamics that are together transforming the world, and particularly developed societies as they are incorporated into a global system of 'digital capitalism'. This paper first describes posthumanism and transhumanism. It then explores two key notions, teleportation and cyborgs, that receive extensive attention in mainstream media and serve as exemplars of this scientistic ideology, locating them both in cultural history and contemporary popular culture. The paper argues that posthumanism and associated phenomena are best seen as an ideological interpellation of humanity into an increasingly dominant scientific and technological order based on the cultural and scientific ascendancy of the 'Informational Paradigm' identified by Katherine Hayles in her inquiry into 'How we became posthuman'

Artificial Intelligence, Robots and the Ethics of the Future

The future rests under the sign of technology. Given the prevalence of technological neutrality and inevitabilism, most conceptualizations of the future tend to ignore moral problems. In this paper we argue that every choice about future technologies is a moral choice and even the most technology-dominated scenarios of the future are, in fact, moral provocations we have to imagine solutions to. We begin by explaining the intricate connection between morality and the future. After a short excursion into the history of Artificial Intelligence, we analyse two possible scenarios, which show that building the future with technology is, first and foremost, a moral endeavor

Organizational Posthumanism

Building on existing forms of critical, cultural, biopolitical, and sociopolitical posthumanism, in this text a new framework is developed for understanding and guiding the forces of technologization and posthumanization that are reshaping contemporary organizations. This ‘organizational posthumanism’ is an approach to analyzing, creating, and managing organizations that employs a post-dualistic and post-anthropocentric perspective and which recognizes that emerging technologies will increasingly transform the kinds of members, structures, systems, processes, physical and virtual spaces, and external ecosystems that are available for organizations to utilize. It is argued that this posthumanizing technologization of organizations will especially be driven by developments in three areas: 1) technologies for human augmentation and enhancement, including many forms of neuroprosthetics and genetic engineering; 2) technologies for synthetic agency, including robotics, artificial intelligence, and artificial life; and 3) technologies for digital-physical ecosystems and networks that create the environments within which and infrastructure through which human and artificial agents will interact. Drawing on a typology of contemporary posthumanism, organizational posthumanism is shown to be a hybrid form of posthumanism that combines both analytic, synthetic, theoretical, and practical elements. Like analytic forms of posthumanism, organizational posthumanism recognizes the extent to which posthumanization has already transformed businesses and other organizations; it thus occupies itself with understanding organizations as they exist today and developing strategies and best practices for responding to the forces of posthumanization. On the other hand, like synthetic forms of posthumanism, organizational posthumanism anticipates the fact that intensifying and accelerating processes of posthumanization will create future realities quite different from those seen today; it thus attempts to develop conceptual schemas to account for such potential developments, both as a means of expanding our theoretical knowledge of organizations and of enhancing the ability of contemporary organizational stakeholders to conduct strategic planning for a radically posthumanized long-term future

Facts of cripness to the Brazilian

The influence of queer theory on the humanities is also reflected in disability studies, contributing to the emergence of crip theory. While the main axiom of queer theory postulates that contemporary society is governed by heteronormativity, crip theory is supported by the socially constructed postulate of compulsory able-bodiedness  that is not very sensitive to the body's diversity. The translation of the term crip into the category of crippled in Portuguese (i.e aleijado) is a way of giving the same sense of the word in English, indicating an area reserved for people with disabilities. Considering that gay and lesbian studies initially focused their investigations on the question of homosexuality being a "natural" or "unnatural" behavior, remaining within a binary logic, queer theory expands the investigative focus by encompassing any kind of sexual practice or identity that circumscribes normative or deviant categories. From this perspective, the disabled bodies are also queer. The objective of this work is to discuss the analytical and intersectional potential of a queer/crip epistemology in the constitution of the disability experience from the "global south", based on  autoethnographic accounts and analysis of the Avatar movie

Facts of cripness to the Brazilian: dialogues with Avatar, the film

The influence of queer theory on the humanities is also reflected in disability studies, contributing to the emergence of crip theory. While the main axiom of queer theory postulates that contemporary society is governed by hetero-cis-normativity, crip theory is supported by the socially constructed postulate of compulsory able-bodiedness that is not very sensitive to the body's diversity. The translation of the term crip into the category of crippled in Portuguese (i.e. aleijado) is a way of giving the same sense of the word in English, indicating an area reserved for people with disabilities. Considering that gay and lesbian studies initially focused their investigations on the question of homosexuality being a "natural" or "unnatural" behavior, remaining within a binary logic, queer theory expands the investigative focus by encompassing any kind of sexual practice or identity that circumscribes normative or deviant categories. From this perspective, disabled bodies are also queer. The objective of this work is to discuss the analytical and intersectional potential of a queer/crip epistemology in the constitution of disability experience from the "global south", based on autoethnographic accounts and analysis of the Avatar movie.A influência da teoria queer nas humanidades também se refletiu nos estudos sobre deficiência, contribuindo para a emergência da teoria crip. A teoria queer postula que a sociedade contemporânea é regida pela hetero-cis-normatividade, enquanto na teoria crip a crítica está no postulado da corponormatividade de nossa estrutura social pouco sensível à diversidade corporal. A tradução do termo crip para aleijado em português é uma forma de dar o mesmo sentido da palavra em inglês, desvelando a zona de abjeção reservada às pessoas com deficiência. Considerando que os estudos gays e lésbicos inicialmente focaram suas investigações na questão da homossexualidade ser um comportamento "natural" ou "antinatural", permanecendo dentro de uma lógica binária, a teoria queer expande o foco investigativo ao abarcar qualquer tipo de prática sexual ou identidade que estejam na fronteira de categorias normativas ou desviantes. Desde essa perspectiva, os corpos deficientes também são queer. O objetivo deste trabalho é discutir, a partir de relatos autoetnográficos e da análise do filme Avatar, o potencial analítico e intersecional de uma epistemologia queer/crip na constituição da experiência da deficiência desde o “sul global”

The desire to upload: a theological analysis of transhumanist advocacy for life-extension and immortality

Transhumanism is a movement dedicated to radically changing the human condition through technology, including by extending lifespan in one of three ways: (1) a biological approach that focuses on reducing the effects of aging, (2) a cybernetic approach that focuses on replacing the body with mechanical equivalents, and (3) a digital approach that focuses on reproducing human minds within computers. This dissertation focuses on the third way, digital immortality, because digitality can serve as a framework for further human enhancement that goes beyond mere life-extension, and thus has nearly unlimited potential to transform the human condition, and also because some forms of digital immortality are already technologically feasible. The dissertation examines transhumanist ideas of digital immortality from three perspectives. First, it employs the lens of theological anthropology to evaluate transhumanist arguments for how and why it is possible to reconstruct a person’s behavior patterns, and perhaps consciousness itself, in a machine. Second, it uses the lens of eschatology to examine the relationship between these immortality scenarios and the technological singularity, including the rise of superintelligent artificial intelligence. Third, it applies the lens of the philosophy of history to examine transhumanist ideas of evolution and the necessity of perpetual cycles of human enhancement to keep pace with AI and future generations of posthumans. The dissertation uses the anthropologies, eschatologies, and philosophies of history constructed by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Jürgen Moltmann to create a framework for comparing Christian theology and transhumanist philosophy. The dissertation concludes that the real conflict between Christian theology and transhumanism is over supernaturalism, the degree to which God intervenes and directs human activity in history. As a result, transhumanists can find common theological ground with Christian naturalists as they pursue the religiously charged questions that transhumanists are asking about the essential nature, purpose, and destiny of humanity

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationThe cultural interaction between nuclear technology and the American West was a two-way process. On one side, an elite brotherhood of scientists and engineers at Los Alamos incorporated the romance of the frontier into the nation's atomic origin story. On the other side, the mythical construct we call "the West" mutated and matured due to its entanglement with the nuclear cycle. Only recently has it become clear that the engineer left an indelible mark on the American West equal to or even greater than that left by the cowboy. However, the engineer and the cowboy were always twin figures in the western imagination, even if the engineer usually lurked in the cowboy's shadow. The links forged between these two symbols early in the twentieth century were deliberately co-opted into the national atomic story after the war. In response, a variety of western atomic discourses began to emerge that both resisted and interacted with national narratives. As nuclearism wrote itself into the West, the stories westerners tell about themselves and their history started to change. Although the focus of this research is on the atomic literatures and discourses of the West-including fiction, memoir, poetry, drama, and nature writing-this is a multidisciplinary project that incorporates an extensive amount of history as well as a bit of scientific theory in order to more fully explore how nuclearism contributed to the changing cultural constructions of wilderness and technology in the twentieth-century American West

Gothic economies: Global capitalism and the boundaries of identity

Since Dickens and Mary Shelley, the Gothic has provided a rubric for literary conceptualizations of modernity. Dickens\u27 depictions of industrial London characterize it as a labyrinth of temptations and horrors, haunted by monstrosity and by personal and social demons; the monster in Mary Shelley\u27s Frankenstein is the disfigured byproduct of science and technology. Bram Stoker\u27s Dracula, perhaps the most effective global narrative to come out of the British fin de siecle, grafted elements of a pre-Enlightenment atavism onto the turn-of-the-century liberal metropolis. In our own era, the literature of the postmodern technopolis---the fiction of William Gibson, for example---has continued to borrow Gothic motifs and devices. This dissertation is a study of literary representations of technology, capitalism and the modern metropolis---representations based in the anxieties and desires that accompany middle-class self-fashioning. The Gothic, in its original guise, depicts the corruption and ruination of the estate, often by economic and cultural forces emanating from the city and associated with capitalism and modernity; thus, to invoke the Gothic is also to reference middle class guilt and doubts about legitimacy. At the same time, Gothic allusions allow the middle class to retell its foundational myth of a struggle for liberation from feudal constraints. Much 19th and 20th literature, both popular and highbrow, entertains an ambiguous and complicated relationship to the city---the site of economic, political and cultural forces which are both liberating and traumatizing. Though capitalism and technology drove its ascendancy, the middle class has traditionally seen the city as a place both of opportunity and danger, of allure and revulsion or horror---a set of mixed emotions which tends to suggest an insecure, unstable or divided subjectivity. This complicated relationship to the city provided much of the impetus for the quest to build a bourgeois utopia ---a refuge located at the fringe of the city in which the equilibrium of a romanticized pre-urban order is recovered. But because the contradictions within middle class identity can never be fully resolved, the utopia always harbors the potential to become a haunted grove, visited by that which has been repressed or abjected in the process of creating modernity